Rubber Band CarBy joe chase, Cj Discullo, and mathew o shonEYe

A rubber band car is a car powered entirely by a rubber band. The materials you can use is as follows: 2 CDs, a kabob skewer, a rubber band, a piece of cardboard, and of course duct tape.

The stored potential energy is when the elastic band is stretched, but when you release the pulled back band the stored potential energy converts into kinetic energy from the car moving. Kinetic energy is energy that is gained while in motion. When you pull the rubber band back it is gaining potential energy and letting it go turns it into kinetic energy making the axel spin and the car move.

Kinetic energy

Four modifications we made were:

1. We put rubber bands around our wheels to add traction for our CDs so that we could gain more speed during the exceleratiom with better traction.

2. We put cardboard around the wheels and axel to create a cardboard barring. We used duct tape at the end of each side of the barring to prevent the wheels from moving around, and to keep them still.

3. We put a kabob skewer at the end to create less friction from the back dragging against the ground. The kabob skewer kept the back of the car up from the ground which created less friction between the car and the ground.

4. We changed the axel size because we didn't want the axel to effect the momentum from the rubber band.

The farthest our car went was 30.5 feet

Velocity and acceleration:

Acceleration formula (Note: a is acceleration, v is velocity, t is time, and unit is meters per second squared)